🔗 Share this article

The football publication is strangely tedious, yet curiously irresistible. Even title causes confusion. Dear England already is used by a popular play, an future TV show, and a open letter penned by the manager in 2021.

This version of Dear England is not formally related to those. It exists as an oddity in the Dear England Multiverse, a book about leadership: a typically dull elite football manager subject that the author follows persistently, employing the words “leadership”, “guiding” or “management” at least 500 times across the book’s entirety.

Themes Raised

“What are leaders? What do leaders do? And what do leaders know?” he asks at the outset, outlining his position, but declining to explore “When are leaders?”, topics probably set aside for a follow-up publication.

Beyond that, this book features a notable absence at its core. It’s an attempt in subtly confrontational self-justification, in nearly but not entirely saying the real point, skipping skillfully from lingering grievance to unscabbed wound across a assortment of pie charts, corporate platitudes and digressions about historical figures.

Reading Experience

Reading it is like overhearing your family members having a controlled but profoundly personal debate in the next room while you’re trying to concentrate on a professional workshop called “Countless Explanations for My Eventual Success”. But it is also impossible to stop reading, as Southgate keeps approaching to something you truly want to discover, before unexpectedly veering away.

Revelations

There are typically news headlines in books of this nature, due to the peeled-eyeball interest with leading the national team. The most striking examples encompass: he resolved he was absolutely going to resign as England manager after fans tossed beer glasses at him at the European Championship; he almost chose to abandoning the game at half-time against Bulgaria in 2019 after his team were racially abused; he pioneered the concept of set-piece coaches and the entire league in the Premier League is now following his lead; he has now abandoned his enthusiasm for football, a surprising admission briefly included in a brief section at the end.

Guiding England through a era of fury, hope, upheaval and confinement was a harsh experience. The wounds are clearly still fresh.

Predictable Elements

In other sections, the text is overrun with an computer-generated verbal clutter of standard guidance discourse. Copies of this book were shared with reviewers under non-disclosure agreements ahead of release, presumably out of apprehension someone might leak that “challenging discussions can, by their very essence, be challenging”, that you should always look before you leap, that guidance occurs where evolution intersects with empathy.

Emotional Core

Readers will find however genuine feeling here. Managing England through a period of fury, aspiration, turmoil and lockdown was a grueling experience. The wounds are clearly still fresh, albeit expressed in a buzzword-filled reinvention of the traditional coach theme: how my decisions were correct about everything throughout.

Specific Examples

The publication’s initial chapter, Trojan-horsed as thrilling recollections of the deciding game of the tournament, is entirely focused on how successful he really was at tactical substitutions (the big common complaint being he wasn’t good at making changes). Later, he delves into extensive analysis about how he handled the deciding game of 2021 flawlessly – notably the failed tiebreaker – because he complied with a set protocol, which suggests that bringing on youthful talents in the closing stages to take the most important kick of their careers was sensible and accurate.

This was validated by a victorious shootout against the Swiss team four years later after a game where England spent the entire match looking as if they were attempting to wear a pullover the inside out. “The control we exerted in that penalty decider was simply exciting,” Southgate writes, in between comparing the display to US Navy Seals eliminating a notorious figure. Oh Gareth.

Missed Opportunities

When we approach to a disclosure, he backs away from specifying people or providing the juice. We discover there were problematic England squad members who required more attention, perhaps because they were indulged early in their careers. But as you lean forward eagerly, he is already veering off into a topic called a leadership concept, which states that as opposed to a collection of qualities or principles, organizational ethos is in fact a phenomenon that is developed by, unfortunately, enough, no more.

Highlights

Included in the better sections are when Southgate writes about the piecemeal method of developing mental toughness in youth, or how he attempted to articulate what it means to be English more clearly and more constructively than any other figure in the limelight. The standout section, there is a truly gripping narrative of that distressing night in the Bulgarian capital where England’s black players were targeted with hatred (and afterwards defended vigorously by their leader).

Genuine Ending

Perhaps the most emotional part {comes|arrives|appears